I’ll read anything by Tim Ferriss — The bestselling author of the Four Hour series of books (Workweek, Body, and now, The 4-Hour Chef) is part genius, yet equal part mad man. In his books, Ferriss explains how to hack your life to happiness by accomplishing more with less work. Some of his insane theories have changed the way I live my everyday life, while some of the others are much less practical (but still a fun to read about).

His latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, is probably my least favorite of his trilogy, focusing on cooking (something I’m not great at and have very little interest in). But the book tries to tackle more than cooking, promising to teach how to become world-class in any skill in record time. This is the area that interested me the most, and these chapters alone make the book worth buying (and for those of you who own a tablet, the Kindle download version is less than $5).

To help promote the release of The 4-Hour Chef, Tim offered to let us publish an excerpt from the book featuring his favorite cooking-related movies and television shows. Read that short excerpt after the jump.